Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [9]
All that’s left to Studs is to try to find what kernels of life the clichérotted world into which he has been exhaustively initiated in one meaningless ritual after another actually contains. Like a plant left in near darkness that tries to move toward the light its every molecule tells it it was formed to receive, Studs at his nadir, when effort is in any conventional sense futile, grows; murder is sometimes more difficult than the murderer anticipates. In Studs’s failure lies his only success. His fatal illness, his “enlarged heart,” a condition that serves to designate his spiritual as well as his physical state, contains his only chance at life.
Out of inertia, Studs works for his father as a housepainter, and though the work has on inherent appeal for him, he comes to take pride in the fact that he does it well, that he’s a professional. As Paddy’s real estate business collapses, Studs wants desperately to help him, but he has—another mistake—sunk his own savings in bad stocks, and is now helplessly watching them disappear. For the first time he realizes that his parents, despite their faults and falsifications, actually love each other, and this perception touches him. Studs himself is now involved with a twenty-five-year-old Irish Catholic woman named Catherine; she is the first important woman in his life since his infatuation with Lucy fifteen years earlier, and she loves him as Lucy never did. He joins the Catholic fraternity, the Order of Christopher, to which is father already belongs, in part because the Order offers life insurance to its members—he’s been turned down elsewhere because of his heart condition; he takes it out in Catherine’s name so that, whatever happens to him, she’ll at least have $1,000. When they quarrel, Studs abandons his punitive masculine ethos, making the first move at reconciliation. In their first sexual encounter, Studs knows he has deflowered her crudely, insensitively. “I’m sorry,” he tells her. Farrell believed that Americans “can’t do as much” with their emotions as Europeans can; it’s crucial that Studs is experiencing “a whole new set of feelings.” “He was beginning to see some of the things that love was.”
In none of this are Studs’s motives and feelings unmixed. His mother, jealous of the woman who is taking her son from her, tells him Catherine is “common” and Studs himself knows that she doesn’t have the “class” that Lucy and his sisters possess. Catherine becomes pregnant and refuses to have an abortion. They get engaged, but, feeling “trapped like a rat in a cage,” Studs takes her to the beach hoping to make her exercise violently enough to induce a miscarriage. At Lake Michigan, he compares her pale, small, dumpy body unfavorably with the tanned beauties he can’t help looking at. All along, he wants a woman as a kind of trophy advertising to other males his own prowess; he often sees Catherine as nothing but one specimen of a totalized category: “women” do this, “women” do that.
Farrell chronicles every shift and contradiction in Studs’s motives—in this sense, and this sense only, is the novel unedited—but so does he. He never claims that he is activated by the high ideals to which all those around him constantly attribute their actions and sentiments, though he occasionally takes their protestations at face value. He can’t tell himself, as a Bogart hero might, that life is like that, the human psyche works this way; he hasn’t the requisite knowledge or the mastery. Instead, he lives as best he can with the mortifying disarray, as he sees it, of his impulses and responses—how can he be having dirty thoughts about a “pure” girl, or want to rid himself of the woman who has